Mark Radcliffe Evans

Art School trained and a qualified stonemason, I have worked with stone for more than thirty years, both creatively and on the restoration of historic and ecclesiastical buildings. I am now living and working in Cambridge having lived on the Welsh borders for many years.

The work always seems to be concerned with time, ruin, fragments, passing, imagined histories, and draws on the skills and disciplines of stone masonry, architectural forms, a lifelong interest in archaeology and history, pattern and sign & symbol. Pieces often contain opposites or ambiguities, and also contrast highly finished surfaces with broken edges with the implications of having been part of a larger form that might have to be visualised.

Themes that currently occupy me, and some of which have done so for some years are pattern, discs and semi-circles, bowls/vessels, towers, stele/standing stones, boat forms; sometimes small scale domestic pieces, often larger and for garden/courtyard settings.

Generally all the stone I use is indigenous; slate and limestones, but also Italian marble. The essence of cutting into the surface of stone is to manipulate light and shade, and that is what the work is; and that work is what the falling of light upon the stone creates and changes. The work is about light and shade; the stone makes it apparent.